Gil wrote, in part: >Or a credit card space-separated in groups of four. (The field is >only 16 characters.)
Yeah, just dumb. -1 for the limitation; -10 when they don't tell you before you enter it; -100 when they don't tell you AFTER you enter it and make you guess. There are plenty of pages that don't like, say, semicolons in text fields, but just sit there and say "NO" if you use one. Nobody tests nothin' no mo'. I blame (fr)Agile. Of course card PANs will be going to 18 digits at some point. The brands already tried to do that, and the issuers screamed, so now we have 8-digit BINs. If any of you have had a Visa or Mastercard reissued with a new number for no apparent reason lately, that's probably why: they clawed back some 6-digit BIN ranges that were underutilized and are reissuing them as 8-digit BINs. So if you were an issuer and had Visa BINs: 411111 422222 433333 but had only issued a few thousand cards in the 433333 range, Visa may have told you "You have to give 433333 back and reissue those cards with some other BIN". Then they'll issue 99 8-digit BINs in the range 43333300 through 43333399 to other issuers. In some cases I suppose it's possible that an 8-digit BIN will simply get converted to 8-digit-that is, if our putative issuer above had issued their few thousand cards all in 43333301, then they might get told "OK, you can keep that BIN but don't use any others in the 433333 range", though my guess is that the brands will not take the risk that the issuer will get that wrong. Easier to just say "No more 433333 for a while". Anyway, stay tuned for 18-digit BINs, coming soon(ish)! I didn't notice when they went from 13 to 16, but I do remember a 13-digit Visa number of mine from the 90s (yes, that's a *really useful* way to spend what's left of my memory!). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
